Part 3. Settling into data science

Starting your first data science job is quite an accomplishment, but it’s only the beginning of your data science career. Working at a company as a data scientist is quite different from doing data science as a hobby or as part of a course. You may need to pick up all sorts of other concepts, from corporate etiquette to the proper way to put code into production. The huge difference between your expectation of what the role will be like and what the work truly is like can be a shock. This part of the book aims to provide a comforting cushion to soften that jolt. By reading this part, you’ll know what to expect in a data science job and be better prepared to excel in it.

Chapter 9 is about the first months on the job, from the first few days, when you may feel totally lost, through settling in as you learn more about the role, your co-workers, and the data. Chapter 10 provides a guide to creating good analyses (a large part of most data science roles) by making and executing a plan at the start. Chapter 11 discusses taking machine learning models and putting them into production, introducing concepts such as unit testing that are essential for more engineering-based data science roles. Chapter 12 is a deep dive into the extremely relevant task of working with stakeholders, which is often the part of a data science job that people struggle with most.